Confessions of the Fox

"Rosenberg is a professor of English literature who teaches queer and trans cultural theory at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This is his first novel, a retelling of the story of Jack Sheppard. I don’t know if you know this history, but in real life, Jack Sheppard was a famous criminal, jail breaker, pickpocket and thief who was a folk hero in early eighteenth-century London. He’s the historical figure that Mack the Knife of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera is based on. Rosenberg re-imagines Jack Sheppard as a transgender man, somebody who was assigned female at birth but identifies in a more masculine way and lives socially as a man. It’s an extraordinarily well written book—the language really transports you to the London streets of three centuries ago. Rosenberg understands the early 18th century as a scholar, but writing about that period in novelistic form allows him to offer a humorous and ironic gloss that wouldn’t fly in a conventional scholarly monograph. This is history and social commentary by other means—knowledgeable, cheeky, fun, politically charged. It’s also really sexy, not a dry historical story at all. It’s a rip-roaring, swash-buckling adventure yarn with a gender outlaw protagonist. It captures the eroticism of being outside the law. Kind of like Sarah Waters’ Victorian stories— Transing the Velvet , maybe—but with a trans hero and a radical critique of political economy at the moment when global capitalism is being consolidated through the British Empire. “Trans identities and practices are one of the crisis points in contemporary society” As an academic historian, one of the things I most like about Rosenberg’s book is that it offers a very light hearted yet serious take on the work of doing scholarship. It reminded me of Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Amitav Gosh’s Ibis trilogy, where there’s a primary text but then there are footnotes and appendices and bibliographies and asides that are actually as much what the book is about as anything else. The frame tale—in which a trans academic at a floundering second-rate university who is going through a painful breakup related to his gender transition finds a previously unknown Jack Sheppard manuscript that’s being tossed out by the university library after being gutted by austerity cuts—the frame tale is what makes Confessions of the Fox truly genius. I find the pseudo-scholarly apparatus of the book hilarious, in a heart-breaking kind of way. But the most deeply compelling dimension of the book for me is that, although it’s historical fiction, it is utterly engaged with the present moment. Trans identities and practices are one of the crisis points in contemporary society. Confessions of the Fox helps us see not only that trans has a long history, but that, then as now, these histories are connected to broader histories of colonialism and capitalism, of racism, police states, surveillance mechanisms, public health crises, urban revolt. Confessions of the Fox makes contemporary trans issues feel like part of a very ‘Long Now.’ Trans issues are not new. Not new at all. It certainly helped that an academic wrote it, but there are plenty of people outside the academy who are really smart, and well informed about the things that they study, who I think could have done something similar. I would, however, say that only somebody who had an embodied experience of being trans would be attuned to the story-telling possibilities that Rosenberg found in retelling the Sheppard story the way he did. When I read it, I feel ‘this is what it’s like to see the world from a trans perspective.’"